


no faces to show

by hethora



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Dreams, Emetophobia, M/M, Purple Prose, Yotsuba Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 04:45:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13069413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hethora/pseuds/hethora
Summary: He swallows him whole in the hours before dawn, and retches him back up as the sun rises. He tastes of carrion both ways.





	no faces to show

The sun rises on his breathing corpse.

There is so little time. He sees every cycle of the sun rising and falling, and with each rotation the next comes quicker.

His lungs believe that every breath is his last, and they weaken as if they are giving up. Most days pass in a lightheaded haze. His vision is blurry, his fingers are numb. The heart in his chest feels too large and blood pumps through it like water wrung from a rag.

The boy who sleeps beside him is killing L, and he doesn’t even know it. Not anymore, not yet. The space they occupy is liminal. It makes L feel incorporeal, as if he could reach for Light’s chest and his hand would go straight to his heart.

He tries it, and his long bony fingers are like feathers on warm skin. They remain separate, of course, and his flesh has never felt like such a cage.

His hand rests there, feeling every rise and fall, until they come quicker and Light wakes.

The sun sets on his breathing corpse.

There is no time at all.

  


* * *

  


He rises from the fog of sleep like a drowned corpse from the river. It’s dark, and quiet. The curtains are parted just enough for Light to see a streetlamp, and the shadow it casts on a passing figure.

L is asleep.

Light has never seen him like this before. At first he thinks it’s an act, but there is a flush on L’s cheekbones and fluttering eyes beneath closed lids. He breathes in deeply, his chest rises. When it falls, Light feels warm, sickly sweet breath on his face and only then notices how near he has crept. He doesn’t draw back.

When the sun’s first rays grasp for the edge of the horizon hours later, Light is still awake.

  


* * *

  


It is a cold night that finds Light on his stomach, L tracing a finger down his spine. He shivers at the touch, and L obliges the unspoken request to continue.

“When you kill me, don’t be quick about it.”

Light tenses, but his position prevents him from facing L. His face remains buried in the covers as he asks “Why?”

The resulting silence is uncomfortable. Cold flesh on warm flesh, unforgivable intimacy. His wrist burns.

“You don’t deny it?”

Light sighs. “I’ve denied being Kira a thousand times, L. Denial isn’t what you want to hear, so you won’t.”

When L hums, Light feels it in his tailbone.

“I want to know that I’m dying. I want to know what you’ve done to me. I want to feel it.”

The links of their chain bounce off one another and it sounds to Light like the ticking of a clock. There is suddenly a weight in his chest, like his ribs are made of lead. His eyes fall shut and he realizes how exhausted he feels.

“Will you do that for me?”

He says nothing; he couldn’t if he wanted. Eventually L’s fingers return to dragging up and down the skin of his back.

The rest of the night passes in silence.

  


* * *

  


He stands in an empty cathedral, massive in its unnatural hollowness. His steps echo before he realizes he is walking, and he ambles between the pews with a hazy tread. His mind is elsewhere, or nowhere, and that this doesn’t concern him is concerning in itself. He feels gauze wrapped around his eyes, cotton stuffed down his throat. It is warm as morning bedsheets, golden light of dawn with touch so gentle as to float on a breath. When he reaches the confessional, he decides that, yes, this was where he intended to be all along. Stooping, he steps inside.

He takes his seat, and waits. For a long time the only sound is his breath, filling his lungs deep and slow, leaving his throat warm and raspy. When enough time has passed that his small compartment seems to have warmed from his presence, the voice of the man who sleeps beside him drifts through the panel. It has all the force of an autumn leaf landing on a pond’s surface, as if he has fought himself to form the words at all, so damning are these sins.

“I breathe,” he whispers, and the barrier between them seems to waver. “I sleep.”

A bell chimes once, twice, three times. The vibration rattles his skull until he feels nauseous. The man giving confession sighs and there is the sound of sickness in his lungs.

“I want,” he moans. “I want, _I want..._ ”

When he wakes, the chain is wrapped around his neck.

  


* * *

  


The change is sudden, and it’s not subtle. L knows there’s a stranger in his bed, but he is familiar enough that he can’t stand to send him away. They touch and it burns. No longer a simple separation, the joining of their flesh is volatile.

The sun moves from morning to night and back again so quickly that his head spins. He is at the end of his life, and there is nothing left to do but wait.

So he burns alive and thanks God for the fire.

  


* * *

  


He swallows him whole in the hours before dawn, and retches him back up as the sun rises. He tastes of carrion both ways.

  


* * *

  


Not long before L dies, though the hours stretch like elastic as the two of them draw nearer, he is beneath Light with eyes rolled behind his skull. He moans and writhes like a man possessed, gasps and sighs in rhythm with Light’s ministrations. He doesn’t say a word in any human language, but Light hears prayers torn from L’s raw throat. He begs for life, and death, and Light. This is how L acknowledges his divinity, Light knows, and it is in these moments that his fondness for the man seems to outweigh his revulsion.

But there is no future in which L may live alongside a God, and Light is ascendant.

Still, he is grateful. Worship is what makes a God, and no one has been so supplicant as L.

  


* * *

  


He blinks and he’s dead. There is no pain, no feeling at all.

Light accepts his apotheosis on a wave of rapturous cruelty.

The sun rises on a rotting corpse.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This is super ooc and the metaphors are pretty heavy handed and you can tell I consulted a thesaurus for all the different ways you can describe godhood. I think this is more fanfiction of Death Note fanfiction than it is of Death Note (which is probably because I haven't had anything to do with Death Note canon in four years). I also haven't written anything in years so. You know. It is what it is. Thank you so much for reading! 
> 
> Edit: Whoops I realized some things didn't make very much sense in the order they were in so I changed some things around.


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